Still, it was necessary that the two men see something of each other.  Hallowell discovered nothing about Norman, not enough about his personal appearance to have recognized him in the street far enough away from the laboratory to dissociate the two ideas.  Human beings—­except his daughter—­did not interest Hallowell; and his feeling for her was somewhat in the nature of an abstraction.  Norman, on the other hand, was intensely interested in human beings; indeed, he was interested in little else.  He was always thrusting through surfaces, probing into minds and souls.  He sought thoroughly to understand the living machines he used in furthering his ambitions and desires.  So it was not long before he learned much about old Newton Hallowell—­and began to admire him—­and with a man of Norman’s temperament to admire is to like.

He had assumed at the outset that the scientist was more or less the crank.  He had not talked with him many times before he discovered that, far from being in any respect a crank, he was a most able and well-balanced mentality—­a genius.  The day came when, Dorothy not having returned from a shopping tour, he lingered in the laboratory talking with the father, or, rather, listening while the man of great ideas unfolded to him conceptions of the world that set his imagination to soaring.

Most of us see but dimly beyond the ends of our noses, and visualize what lies within our range of sight most imperfectly.  We know little about ourselves, less about others.  We fancy that the world and the human race always have been about as they now are, and always will be.  History reads to us like a fairy tale, to which we give conventional acceptance as truth.  As to the future, we can conceive nothing but the continuation of just what we see about us in the present.  Norman, practical man though he was, living in and for the present, had yet an imagination.  He thought Hallowell a kind of fool for thinking only of the future and working only for it—­but he soon came to think him n divine fool.  And through Hallowell’s spectacles he was charmed for many an hour with visions of the world that is to be when, in the slow but steady processes of evolution, the human race will become intelligent, will conquer the universe with the weapons of science and will make it over.

When he first stated his projects to Norman, the young man had difficulty in restraining his amusement.  A new idea, in any line of thought with which we are not familiar, always strikes us as ridiculous.  Norman had been educated in the ignorant conventional way still in high repute among the vulgar and among those whose chief delight is to make the vulgar gape in awe.  He therefore had no science, that is, no knowledge—­outside his profession—­but only what is called learning, though tommyrot would be a fitter name for it.  He had only the most meager acquaintance with that great fundamental of a sound and sane education, embryology.  He knew